Look Again: The Multiples of Photographic Discernment and Production

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Photography and Culture

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Look Again: The Multiples of PhotographicDiscernment and Production

Jordan Bear

To cite this article: Jordan Bear (2009) Look Again: The Multiples of Photographic Discernmentand Production, Photography and Culture, 2:1, 51-76

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Photography & Culture Volume 2—Issue 1—March 2009, pp. 51–76

Photography & Culture

Volume 2—Issue 1March 2009pp. 51–76DOI 10.2752/175145209X419426

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Look Again: The Multiples of Photographic Discernment and ProductionJordan Bear

Jordan Bear is currently completing his doctorate in the Department of Art History at Columbia University in New York on an American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He previously served as the Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work, published in History of Photography, Cabinet, and Visual Resources among other venues, focuses on the political modalities of visual conviction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography and film.

AbstractThis essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy in Britain in the 1860s. The investigation is anchored by the close analysis of two exemplars of the second generation of British photography, O. G. Rejlander and his student and sometime rival Henry Peach Robinson, whose photographs evince a complex repertoire which engages the viewer’s ability to discern the mode of their constructedness, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and consistent pictorial clues. Indeed, one might say that Rejlander and Robinson’s central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. This dubiousness was the basis through which the two photographers elaborated an iconography that made the process of discerning the specific modalities of their intervention the basis of their production. They fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement

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52 Look Again: Photographic Discernment and Production Jordan Bear


to the pursuit of commercial pleasure and in so doing sacrificed the primary feature through which the photograph has traditionally been thought to have secured its influence: its transparency and access to an unmediated referential world.

Keywords: photography, commercialization, mass production, discernment, series, time, chance

The rarefied ambiance of the Photographic Society of London, founded in 1853 largely as an exclusive organization of wealthy amateurs had, by the end of the decade, been infiltrated by what seemed to these gentlemen an almost existential threat. The sanctity of the Society’s organizing principle—a thirst for the discussion and dissemination of the new medium among the baronial company of social equals—had been sullied by the grime and soot of tradesmen, and their celebrated exhibitions had been invaded by the cheap produce of the commercial photographer. “We desire to see the Photographic Society taking and maintaining its proper place amidst the societies established for the advancement of Science and Art in this country,” lamented one reviewer, remarking dourly that “It has allowed itself to be overridden by the commercial element; and unless, ere yet it be too late, the council resolves to return to and maintain a far more independent position, the fate of the Society is sealed” (Anonymous 1859: 46). That fate was, as this writer presciently noted, perhaps inevitable, for the Society’s exhibitions had already ceded so much ground to the burgeoning practice of photography for profit: the

catalogs had begun to list prices, and more than a few members fretted that the once noble ambitions of the annual event seemed little more than an elegant frame in which to swaddle distasteful appeals to potential buyers. Some of the more reactionary members sought to prohibit the display of photographs that had been on commercial display, but they were ultimately rebuffed (Seiberling 1986: 73). The Society seemed to them more akin to the Strand of bird-sellers and petty entertainers than to the contemplative redoubts of the Linnaeans.

The industrialization of photography in the 1850s had flooded the spaces of London with photographs, many of poor quality, most remarkably inexpensive, and virtually all antithetical to what the gentlemen of taste who bonded together to form the Photographic Society had planned for their nascent medium. Photographs were progressively implicated in a variegated landscape of commodities. Appearing far from the laboratory of Talbot, a country squire and amateur chemist, they had also slipped away from the pristine refuge of the exhibition wall. Many of the increasingly irascible members of the Photographic Society, and the influential critics who comprised a newly vibrant photographic press, seethed over two particular dimensions of these images: their volume, and their unoriginality. In an intemperate moment, Alfred H. Wall, a prolific commentator for the relatively conservative British Journal of Photography, exclaimed that “Cheapness is the order of the day … The carte portraits, the ‘postage stamp’ portraits, and the fifty reproduced portraits for half a crown, readily suggest themselves.” With new maladroit practitioners flocking

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Jordan Bear Look Again: Photographic Discernment and Production 53


to the lucrative pursuit on a daily basis, he wondered, “Where, then, is this race of cheapness to end?” (Wall 1863: 408). Where it ended was in a new level of photographic saturation of daily life in the metropolis, of a deluge of imagery that occupied a central place in a visual culture that seemed to drift increasingly away from the beacon of taste that the Photographic Society had aspired to be.

The blizzard of photographic production noted by Siegfried Kracauer in his classic essay on photography was one that characterized not only the Weimar Germany in which he was writing but, perhaps even more acutely, the early years of the medium’s industrialization. Kracauer saw in this accumulation not just the odiousness of quantity that his British predecessors bewailed but also—perhaps counterintuitively—a possibility for a revolutionary reexamination of the capitalist realm that enabled it. “Photography,” he asserted, “is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production,” one which reifies the defining features of that system (Kracauer 1995 [1927]: 61). Yet, Kracauer proposed, this repetitive confrontation of the production of photographs might in fact enable “a liberated consciousness [that] would be given an incomparable opportunity … less enmeshed in the natural bonds than ever before, it could prove its power in dealing with them.” The vacuity, superficiality, and repressiveness of the world of mass production could be revealed to the populace that knew where, and how, to look for it. This explicit link between judgment, visual acuity, and the discernment of the capitalist basis of the proliferating photograph is one which Kracauer articulated most directly, but the

connection was one forged at the time of photography’s marriage to industry. This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy, excavating the conceptual bases on which a number of putatively frivolous photographs operated to modulate a particular kind of visual autonomy: one in which discernment itself was both commodified and infused with the logic of production. It was an enterprise of urgency to a culture ever more permeated by the promise of capitalism, and one which depended upon the malleability of visual belief, and of the exemplary visual medium of conviction.

Agency and Good TasteIn the appeals of the grouchy gentlemen amateurs there is almost an obsession with the sheer quantity of photographs being produced under these new and very unsettling conditions. With the emergence of glass-based collodion negatives, the tight license restrictions on Talbot’s calotype, which had been the exclusive means of producing photographic multiples, were no longer an impediment to the execution of photography on a mass scale. It is remarkable how rapidly the transfer of the positive-negative principle into the public domain shifted its aesthetic and political valences, for the venerable practice of the amateur was almost instantaneously recast as a vehicle for the moral degradation of culture at large. The increasing vehemence with which social improvement organizations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice condemned salacious photographs, and the broad support their interventions enjoyed among those displeased by the medium’s

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new ethos, indicates how intimately the notion of photography’s multiplicity was intertwined with its presumed immorality. Naturally, the insalubrious photographs in question were, almost without exception, multiples, spawned by the proliferating collodion process. The cheapness of its images was twofold, residing in both its tawdry subject matter and its wide availability. The quest to rid the visual world of pornographic indecencies rarely extended to the daguerreotype, a relatively expensive image incapable of being reproduced (Popple 2005: 125). If the gentleman might have a monogamous relationship with his unique, deluxe bit of pornography, where was the harm? If, on the other hand, a photographed woman shared that relationship with any workingman with the requisite coins, that was something else entirely. The promiscuity that mass- produced photographs enacted was at least as destabilizing as that which they depicted.

Of equal alarm to this multiplicity of production was the fact that these piles of images seemed to betray a repetition of conception in which the unoriginality of the object was matched by the paucity of creativity of its representation. The same reviewer who wrote so uneasily about the commercial infiltration of the 1859 Photographic Society exhibition cringed at the chief defect of these offerings: “The impression that we receive on entering the rooms is, that they exhibit a stereotype-like sameness—a repetition in character, with slight variations” (Anonymous 1859: 46). Wall was more direct in linking this sameness to the exigencies of mass production:

You may picture one of these “artists” for yourself, if you please. He is popping about in his sky-parlour studio, from one to another of a row of canvasses. With four sweeps of a brush filled with blue paint four azure skies are completed; with the same number of dark violet streaks four silvery rivers; and four sets of a dozen dabs each manufacture four green backgrounds. (Wall 1863: 409)

If the standardization necessitated by the caprices of the market reduced paintings to such a level of degradation, what of photographs, which had the additional burden of overcoming their supposedly mechanical genesis? How, under these conditions, could they be seen as anything but the discharge of an apparatus lacking the agency to produce anything other than regular, homogenized commodities?

There was, however, some hope of a middle ground, between the chastity of the single image and the licentiousness of its mass-produced cousin. Just as Wall had pilloried the fifty portraits one might purchase for half a crown, he saw in a few promising men a compromise between the inevitable expansion of commercialism and the sensitivity and taste of amateur practice. The cause was pressing, and the metaphor military: “I consider myself as a kind of recruiting-sergeant, beating up for recruits to serve in the army of Generals Robinson and Rejlander” (Wall 1862: 450). Wall’s enlistment on behalf of these two photographers was predicated upon reining in that most deleterious dimension of commercial photography: quantity. “Such apostles of the True as Rejlander and Robinson represent,” he cautioned,

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“will assuredly fight the battle of our art in vain if we send forth our thousands of ludicrously inartistic card-pictures to plead against them in nearly every shop window and from nearly every drawing-room table throughout Europe” (Wall 1862: 450). Unlike their predecessors at the forefront of photographic production, these two men were hardly of the smart social set of Talbot, nor did their interests in photography derive from scientific experimentation: Oscar Gustave Rejlander was a Swedish immigrant and provincial painter, Henry Peach Robinson an autodidact artist and sometime bookseller. By the late 1850s, they were both well-known and successful professionals, and Wall’s encomium indicates that even among those with a pronounced distaste for commerce, the two were seen to have produced pictures of a redeeming caliber. One favorable review of Rejlander’s works published by a gentleman indicates that in spite of their immersion in working-class spaces of entertainment, his photographs are figured like jewels in the rough:

Mr. Rejlander’s works are not so familiar to us all as they should be, in consequence of that gentleman’s reluctance to send his work to photographic exhibitions; but to those who dared the annoyance of a low place of amusement such as the North-Eastern London Exhibition unfortunately became before its close, what I have said would be found fully illustrated in the beautiful collection of works he there displayed. (Anonymous 1865)

What was it that made them the ideal generals to command the forward charge of photography? How did they reconcile their paradoxical status as both profit-seeking

professionals and men of judgment to whom the credibility of photography as an artistic force could be entrusted?

Despite the commercial ambitions and successes of Robinson’s pictures, he retained in his work a conceptual affinity with the older amateurs that was to prove crucial to his position as a figure in whom many of the ambivalences of the photograph in the 1850s were embodied and, somewhat incompletely, reconciled. Robinson, unlike his colleague Rejlander, was a prolific writer and we know a good deal about his responses to contemporary photographic debates by virtue of his natural verbosity. When one critic claimed that: “The true artist in pictures like these is the sitter rather than the photographer,” Robinson was driven nearly to apoplexy (Anonymous 1857: 37). In one of his most illuminating works, Robinson discussed the hotly contested role of the model in his photographs and, in particular, his desire to direct them with control: “My models are trained to strict obedience, and to make no suggestions. If a photographer has really got an idea in his head, he had better carry out that idea. Any interference, even from superior intelligence, is sure to go wrong” (Robinson 1895: 53). The rhetoric that Robinson employed to describe his relationship to his models—those individuals in his employ—here takes on the flavor of the shop taskmaster, a persona that was not at all incommensurate with his actual status in the capitalized system of commercial photography. As Steve Edwards’s recent work has pointed out, the social position of photographers such as Robinson and Rejlander overlaps in significant ways with that of the petit-bourgeoisie, a group characterized in this moment by a drift from

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radicalism and solidarity with the aims of the Chartists to a far more reactionary distrust of labor which mirrored that of the large-scale capitalists who increasingly funded their operations (Edwards 2006: 101–4). This attitude was born of necessity, as Edwards asserts:

To appear worthy of credit, masters needed to run their workshops in a businesslike manner. This meant adopting middle-class norms of propriety and marking one’s distance from the working community. Fundamentally, it meant imposing capitalist work discipline on an artisan labor force. Most small masters accepted this logic of the market, turned against the customary culture of the workshop, and sought to subject their workforce to the new rhythms and patterns of work. (Edwards 2006: 103)

In Robinson’s disdain for the necessary presence of the model, we can locate an ideological accord with the social class to which the increasingly successful photographer aspired. The untidy business of business, a distinct distaste for the labor required to make Robinson’s photographic house work, was one that the gentlemen of the Photographic Society might easily recognize, for the gentry had, by the middle of the century, become a class of capitalists, whose intellectual pursuits were subsidized by the toil of their own workers which—unlike Robinson’s—could be safely sequestered from view.

Within this conception of production, to which a factory-owning gentleman amateur might be especially sympathetic, Robinson was able to indicate a particular set of class allegiances while continuing to engage in

commercial pursuits which otherwise would have seemed utterly antithetical to good taste. With Robinson’s assertion that his models were merely vessels comporting with his conception, he expressed his agency as a photographer, his intervention and judgment guiding a figure, almost always of low social class, to articulate his vision. If his models were to receive the lion’s share of the credit for Robinson’s photographs—and in some cases they certainly had—the surest way to reassert his status was to foreground his role as an arbiter of taste, a desire that paradoxically demanded that he make perfectly clear the mediated quality of his photographs. This very overt demonstration of Robinson’s good taste and sagacity was evocative of the selectivity and agency which seemed so lacking in the commercial photograph, and upon which organizations like the Photographic Society prided themselves. Such images, suffused with the marks of a particular photographic sensibility and variety, could hardly be the product of a mere machine: cultivation was reasserted as an essential trait of the successful photographer, even within the realm of commerce.

“So Near the Real Thing”What is noteworthy about Robinson’s achievement, however, is not merely that he seemed to embody enough residual gentlemanly agency in his photography, but that this revelation of intervention would itself become the very basis of his commercial success. Robinson’s photographs evince a complex repertoire that engages the viewer’s ability to discern the mode of his mediation, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and

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consistent pictorial clues. By demonstrating how noncommercial his sensibility was—how little his photographs were like those of the mass-production line—Robinson courted the pleasure that comes from visual perceptiveness, an experience that was surprisingly lucrative. As David Coleman has succinctly characterized Robinson’s aims, he was “asking the viewer to accept these fictions rather than to believe them as facts” (Coleman 2005). Indeed, one might say that Robinson’s central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. I would go even further, however, and assert that this dubiousness was the basis through which Robinson elaborated an iconography that made the process of discerning the specific modalities of his intervention the basis of his production. Robinson fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement to the pursuit of commercial pleasure. While the working man could be rendered a more efficient and politically compliant producer by the revelatory experience of scientific and mechanical demonstrations, the discernment of the visual required by those activities made him the ideal consumer of entertainments which thematized that very ability, which engaged his recently honed sense of visible realities and deceptions. Robinson wagered his commercial success on the proposition that viewers would be able, and indeed interested, to engage with photography in a way that was predicated, from the start, upon a recognition of its fundamentally mediated status. That such an approach was even contemplated, let alone deployed to great interest, indicates just how deeply ambivalent photographic neutrality

was in the 1850s, and how readily the modes of visual education and discernment cultivated by institutional authorities could be commercialized precisely by denying the photograph its transparent dominion. Robinson summarized this project nicely: “Cultivated minds do not require to believe that they are deceived, and that they look on an actual scene when they behold a pictorial representation” (Robinson 1869: 109). The strange constellation of belief was pointed out in a review of an exhibition in which Rejlander and Robinson participated, the critic grousing that:

It is with no small feeling of regret we observe that the Exhibition of the Arts and Manufactures of North-Eastern London has degenerated into what is commonly known as a three-penny gaff … Science, art, and mountebankism are now here on equal footing, only the latter seems to possess the greatest attraction for the visitors. During our last visit the entertainment consisted of a display of tightrope dancing and juggling. (Anonymous 1865)

These games of discernment and recognition were, in Robinson’s own accounts, infused with the class dimensions that had proven so central to the assumptions surrounding the efficacy of his friend Rejlander’s combination photograph The Two Ways of Life. The commitment to the idea of a physiological visual capacity rooted in the observer’s class, which (mis)guided so many of the ploys of visual education of the period, is still very much present in Robinson’s anecdotes about his own picture-making. Protesting critiques of his choice and direction of aristocratic

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models for certain rustic, peasant scenes, he insisted that:

My models may be called to some extent artificial, but they are so near the real thing as to be taken for it by the real natives, just as the trout does not seem to know the difference between the natural and artificial fly. One day two of my models were walking across the park, and a gamekeeper, seeing them for the first time, made after them, shouting in the high tone that sounds like quarreling to the stranger when he first hears it in Wales … getting near them, he found to his dismay they were “the daughters of the house.” (Robinson 1869: 53)

The gamekeeper’s undiscerning eye had caused him to engage in a social transgression: berating the daughters of his landed employer in a brogue which, like his visual sensibility, is marked by a rude provincialism. Taken in by the temporarily dressed-down upmarket ladies, the dupe here might stand for the kind of uncultivated viewer who would be ill-equipped to partake of Robinson’s photographs of visual discrimination. Indeed, Robinson would later express his self-satisfaction at having pulled off a similar feat in his very famous combination photograph Bringing Home the May. This deception did not arise from design, but the pleasure Robinson takes in revealing its constructedness is telling:

The selected model for the back figure, although she had some practice, got nervous, and could not stand still. There was no time to select and train another, and the principal figure was quickly dressed in her clothes and performed the

part. That there are two figures from one model has never been detected, and this is the first time it has been mentioned. (Robinson 1898: 30)

As in the case of this photograph, Robinson’s clues are ones which often emerge in a way that is entirely congruent with their conditions of production: by way of the kind of belabored repetition so despised by many amateurs. The structure of commercial production, which fashioned a longitudinal accumulation of an iconography over time across several pictures, became the organizing principle of many of Robinson’s games of discernment. His makeshift model, impossibly occupying two positions and personae at once, points to the limitations of the single photograph, an inadequacy to which the composite was, in some important ways, a major response. This was one of a number of ways in which the photograph was inherently dubiously suited to representing the referential world. If the composite served as a kind of compression and artificial obfuscation of a series of discrete, incommensurate moments, Robinson’s arsenal of deception was far more variegated than this single approach. Yet, his repertoire remained immersed in the paradoxical relationship of the photograph to the coherent moment, for it was here that the medium’s lack of transparency might best be proffered to a commercial appetite for exercising visual discrimination.

Newly Caught NatureThe photographic moment and its connection to the artificial could hardly be more aptly demonstrated than by an image that Robinson exhibited at the 1859

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Photographic Society annual exhibition, a venue by then fully infused by the presence of commercial photography. In a series of four photographs representing the famous Brothers Grimm tale, Little Red Riding Hood, which had reached its modern and rather tame version around this time, Robinson makes the central image of the group redolent with the problematic relationship between the time of a dynamic narrative and that of mid-century photographic technology. While the first two images in the sequence evoke the familiar story with effectiveness and economy, the climactic scene of the naive girl’s encounter with the wolf masquerading as her grandmother brings the progress of narrative to an abrupt halt (Figures 1–3). This scene received by far the greatest share of the critical attention, which tended to fixate on the unconvincing nature of the tableau. One critic was, as Katherine DiGiulio points out, particularly displeased by the expression of the girl: “It is … very difficult for a sitter to preserve, for any length of time, the expression of astonishment when not at all astonished” (DiGiulio 1986: 120). Yet, the artificiality of this pose is one that has a conceptual equilibrium with that of the wolf, for while the duration of the exposure time had compelled the model to assume an uneasy gesture, the stuffed wolf was the ideal sitter for such a scene, his mobility already arrested by the taxidermist. Robinson has juxtaposed the two in such a way that it illuminates an affinity between these two methods of arresting time, photography and taxidermy, methods which rely upon a shared presumption of referentiality to the things they represent. As one critic has recently written, “Taxidermy and photography are constructed from surfaces: both peel a layer

Fig 1 Henry Peach Robinson, Little Red Riding Hood (1858). Royal Photographic Society.

from the world which they then present as truth. These are modern technologies which testify to a stubborn Western equation of appearance with reality … photographs and stuffed animals are signs which have a real connection to their referents” (Hauser 1998–99: 8). Yet this equation is clearly one that Robinson is interrogating here, for he has subsumed within one representational medium that stakes a dubious claim to reality another whose fabrication is pronounced, complicating their shared relationship to an unmediated trace. The wolf is so artificial that its appearance is met by a reaction which, in its own fraudulence, suggests that Little Red Riding Hood has not been duped by the reality of the predator, nor should

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the picture’s viewer be convinced by her response. This photograph is, at its heart, about the affective modalities of uncovering visual deception. But it is a particular kind of faulty deception that occasions Robinson’s meditation: the technological inability of the camera to capture an instantaneous response or, for that matter, to discriminate between an animate wolf and a stuffed one.

It is not surprising to discover that a consuming debate among zoologists

and natural historians in the 1850s concerned precisely the incapacity of properly preserving the ephemerality that characterized observation of the natural world. One handbook for taxidermists bemoaned the state of the art, noting that while “methods have been devised of arresting for a time the progress of decay … these seem gradually to lose their effect, and ultimately become mutilated and decomposed” (Brown 1851: 3). Its author goes on to recommend that if taxidermy


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is to reach its scientific potential, a new generation with the capacity to distinguish between live and stuffed specimens must be trained: “The first thing, therefore, to be attended to in all great natural history establishments, is to choose young persons who are yet in their boyhood to be instructed in this art, most important to science … every opportunity of examining the habits and actions of the living subject should be embraced” so that he may learn to cease the practice of making animals

whose “proportions and character are likely to be devoid of all appearance of animation” (Brown 1851: 3). Such a desire was complemented by the opening in Regent’s Park in 1847 of the Zoological Society to the public at large at a moderate price, an institution that hoped to forge this next generation of sharp-eyed connoisseurs of the wild. A beaming Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting the competing Surrey Gardens with his young son Julian, reported that the menagerie included “some skins of


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snakes so well stuffed that I took them for live serpents, till Julian discovered the deception” (Hawthorne 1941: 251–2.) If the new naturalists were already nascent, a variety of venues hoped to cater to the didactic principles which might enhance their perceptiveness. The taxidermy manual illustrates its pedagogic lessons with a series of engravings that reveal the invisible insides of a well-constructed specimen of a wolf, furnishing its readers with the kind of incisive eye to penetrate beyond the surface (Figure 4). Such an eye is implicit in those viewers who will decipher the status of Robinson’s wolf, who will have the capacity, gleaned from the panoply of alternatively instructive and didactic venues filled to the brim with a diversity of fauna, to know the unreality of what they are seeing.

Fig 4 Engraving of a taxidermy specimen from Captain Thomas Brown, The Taxidermist’s Manual; or, the Art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History (London: A. Fullarton, 1851).

For Robinson’s sometime mentor and comrade O. G. Rejlander, this knowledge is the subject of two photographs made around the time of Robinson’s Little Red Riding Hood, emphasizing the importance of cultivating this particular kind of vision (Figure 5). Entitled The Young Naturalist (c.1860), this photograph depicts the act of instructing a child in the discrimination of natural objects: fossils and skulls of similar appearance arrayed side by side, the ideal arrangement for a comparative education. In another contemporary image, The Fly Catcher (c.1860), we see a young boy focusing his keen sight on a tiny speck of an insect on the wall, readying himself to capture it (Figure 6). He carries with him a pair of books and, having seen the pleas of just one advocate of natural history education among many, it is not too whimsical to speculate what kind of books these were, and what their objectives likely consisted of. Yet the fly-catching boy is somewhat distinct from his counterpart being educated in natural history amidst the comforts of the home. His efforts are more predatory, for his eye is trained on that animal which he hopes to possess, to extend beyond the ephemerality of the moment the ability to contemplate and view the evasive fly. He wants, that is, to achieve that which Rejlander’s picture has putatively already accomplished, although we know the technological limitations of Rejlander’s lens would in fact preclude the instantaneity that is the photograph’s motif and metaphor.

The boy’s status here echoes a kind of hybrid identity that both Rejlander and Robinson would adopt throughout their careers, that of the hunter-photographer. Robinson directly associated this role with

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the question of deception when he wrote of his much-debated models: “I am quite conscious that I am laying myself open to the charge of masquerading; but art is a slate of compromises and sacrifices, and I cannot but think what is lost in absolute unrelenting naturalness when substituting trained models for the newly caught nature” (Robinson 1895: 52). This “catching” of nature is thus denied as a desirable or possible accomplishment in photography, and the hunter metaphor

emerges as a signal of photographic manipulation rather than as a testament to the keenness of the photographer’s eye. The young fly catcher’s moment, necessarily a construction, invites the viewer to recognize that this artificial image of perceptiveness demands the genuine, antithetical counterpart from its observer, precisely so that he may identify the difference between the two. Rejlander’s self-portrait Man Aiming Rifle (c.1860) embraces this conceit, for

Fig 5 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Young Naturalist (c.1860). Royal Photographic Society.

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while the photograph purports to show the hunter-photographer in the exercise of his visual acuity, we note that he performs this act before a blank studio background that begins to roll up in parallel to his gun barrel (Figure 7). Photographic looking, even when it is thematized so elegantly, is developed into a sign of the insufficiency of an uncritical apprehension of the photograph itself. The moment captured by the apparatus of even the most alert photographer is no more a reality than the stasis of the fly or the rusticity of the hunter’s setting. The conjoined fantasy of arresting the dynamism of the natural world by gun and by lens is itself a crucial lesson in the development of

Fig 6 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Fly Catcher (c.1860). Royal Photographic Society.

Fig 7 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Man Aiming Rifle (c.1856). George Eastman House.

the discerning eye essential to the success of Rejlander’s and Robinson’s pictures.

Of course, this association would conceptually nurture the development of a variety of photographic “weapons”: Jules Janssen’s photo revolver designed to record the transit of Venus across the sun in 1874 and, most famously, Etienne-Jules Marey’s improved version several years later (Figure 8). A decade earlier, however, the notion of such artillery being truly instantaneous was still a technological impossibility. Genuine instantaneity is the product of the contingent dynamism of the world, of the capricious path of the bird’s flight, not the contrived and immobile “moment” of the fly catcher, which

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in the 1850s and 1860s was, of necessity, a duration disguised as instant. The capacity to capture photographically the wolf, and the fly, was a function of their collective fraudulence, one whose accomplice is the solitude of the image. Is it any wonder that some of the first and most renowned images produced with the capacity for relative instantaneity again turned to the animal world, the very subject to which the mode of photographic

production it supplanted was unsusceptible, and seized upon those features of movement that debunked conventional pictorial representation? The incapacities of the single image of the earlier generation were the foil for Marey, Muybridge, and their imitators. That this inherent opposition of the photograph to a privileged moment—indeed its travesty of such a possibility—was an organizing principle of the most ambitious photographic work of the 1870s—suggests just how pervasive skepticism about the transparency of images like Robinson’s and Rejlander’s had become and, likely, always was. It was a skepticism that these earlier photographers thematized time and again in their pictures, cultivating in their viewers a knowledge of the mediated nature of the images, reasserting their agency in the representations they created. It was nothing as capricious or arbitrary as nature that dictated the moments of their photographs.

Specious SingularityIn many of the forms that the commercial dissemination of photographs took, the notion of the single, autonomous image and its relationship to the verisimilitude of the instant was implicated in the serial nature of mass production itself. It is especially striking to consider the fact that among the most common ways for the consumer to browse and select the inexpensive photographs that he would purchase were the so-called index-books, visual catalogs of a given studio’s stock. One description of these volumes suggests their affinity with the scale of their production:

Large apartments are appropriate to the baths in which cartes de visite are

Fig 8 Engraving of Etienne-Jules Marey’s photographic gun (c.1895).

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immersed, and a feminine clatter of tongues directs us to the rooms in which the portraits are gummed on cardboard and packed up. Every portrait is pasted in a book, and numbered consecutively. This portrait index-book contains many thousands of cartes de visite, and a reference to any one of them gives the clue to the whereabouts of the negative. (Wynter 1863: 310)

A number of these books from Paris have survived, including one from the Nadar studios which, in its parallel commercialization, had been handed over from the senior Nadar to his entrepreneurial son, who promptly turned it into the kind of photo factory described in London. That these volumes were perhaps the primary mode of interacting with the enormous selection produced by commercial studios is problematic for an account of photography which relies, to any extent, upon the medium’s presumed transparency among the

nineteenth-century viewer, for the central features of commercialized photography—the artless repetition of models, props, settings, and motifs so derided by members of the Photographic Society—were displayed in these arrays, one next to the other. And most strikingly, they were juxtaposed in ways which, by virtue of the conditions of mass production that wrought them, necessarily negated the verisimilitude of any one image.

One of the most revealing display boards of this kind is that of the Nadar studio depicting the actress Helene Petit in a dramatization of Zola’s L’Assommoir (Figure 9). A strip of four images depicts the crucial moment in Zola’s narrative. The protagonist Gervaise and her daughter Anna watch in horror as the family patriarch, the tragically clumsy roofer Coupeau, plunges from atop a structure he is helping to build (Zola 1938 [1877]). The moment depicted is the crucial one in Zola’s story, the point at which the fortunes

Fig 9 Sheet from the index-books of the Nadar studio (c.1865).

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of all concerned are irrevocably changed. The first image of this narrative apex, one effected by the dynamism of Coupeau’s plummet, seems, on its own, to reiterate the aspired instantaneity of Robinson and Rejlander’s photographs, ostensibly capturing a critical moment. Yet the effect is strikingly altered when one examines the group of four more closely, for they are not identical representations, but have been subtly altered by the photographer. The gestures of Gervaise oscillate between the clutching of her head in horror, to the almost defensive disbelief of her hands, raised as if to shield herself from that horror. Anna’s pose shifts as well, and the appearance in the third and fourth photographs of a straw basket which, like Coupeau, has succumbed to gravity, adds to the pathos of the scene. Yet what we see in these four photographs is not a progression in time, but a variation of detail around a central immutable architecture, for while the photographer tinkers with his models and their accoutrements, the figure of Coupeau remains suspended in the same airborne position. The quantities of selection available to the consumers of the Nadar studio’s imagery—the heart of its commercial advantage and the result of its adoption of an industrial scale of production—had become entirely antithetical to any notion of photographic verisimilitude. Unless the photographer had taken the extraordinary step of heaving poor Coupeau from the roof over and over again—an abusive tactic, even by Victorian labor standards—it is inevitable to the viewer of these images that the fall and the narrative crisis it precipitates is neither externally “real” nor, equally important, unique. And yet that was the very criticism of, and basis for,

the expansion of commercial photographic production: the irrelevance of uniqueness, at the conceptual level of the ingenuity or singularity of the scene, and at the material level of the endless availability of these mass-produced diversions. It is especially ironic to recall the biography of the chronoscope or “time-seer,” an instrument first invented in the late 1840s to measure the time of falling bodies, and which helped to verify Galileo’s assertion that such objects are uniform in their rate of acceleration. Later, this device would help to set a standardized time signal, free from the errors associated with human astronomical observation (Schmidgen 2002). The rate of Coupeau’s descent is an extravagant hybrid of these desires for the chronoscope, his plummet made uniform among all his observers. His fall is outside of time, but nevertheless reifies the regularization of temporality which reached its apotheosis in this uniformity of viewed time.

Rejlander’s The Juggler (c.1860) demonstrates a trick related to that of his French counterpart, two balls aloft and two more poised to join them (Figure 10). As remote from didactic purposes as juggling seems to our sensibilities, it was, in the nineteenth century, closely associated with a mode of training the eye and the mind to act in concert, and was proposed on more than one occasion as a vital addition to the nation’s school curricula. William Hazlitt, upon seeing an Indian juggler, exclaimed: “It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever-anxious application up to manhood can accomplish” (Hazlitt 1845: 87). Another admirer asserted that:

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the tricks performed by jugglers afford a most wonderful example of the perfection that our senses and organs are capable of attaining under the influence of exercise … He must know the exact spot wither his ball will go, calculate the parabola that it will describe, and know the exact time that it will take to describe it. His eye must take in the position of three, four, or five balls that are sometimes several yards apart, and he must solve these different problems in optics, mechanics, and mathematics instantaneously, ten, fifteen, twenty times per minute. (Hopkins 1977 [1897]: 139–40)

He concluded accordingly that “Juggling has sufficient advantages as regards the development of the touch, the quick calculation of distances, the nimbleness of the fingers, and the accuracy of the eye and of motion, to cause it to be added to those gymnastic exercises which children are taught at school.” The number of visual scientific lessons that were consolidated into this practice is astonishing, but its pedagogic efficacy is articulated with surprising regularity. Equally puzzling is an almost exactly contemporary definition of the term “juggling” as something apparently quite distinct from this noble exercise: “Juggling, n., deception, imposture, artifice” (Reid 1846: 235). It was a pursuit, then, seen as both deceptive to those uninitiated in its modalities, but also beneficial to those who might be initiated into them, a celebration of visual acuity and a denigration of visual gullibility. The airborne figure is, in this sense, akin to the stuffed specimen: they are both generic indices of the nature of the deception they are perpetrating. They occupy a place in photographic production which seemed especially suited to a program of visual discrimination, a place demarcated by an ambivalent relationship to the temporality of photography and its industrialization, and to the larger web of increasingly rationalized time that dictated the demands upon the viewers to whom Rejlander and Robinson’s photographs ostensibly appealed.

The discernment of motion exemplified by the keen eye of the juggler was, to be sure, a key locus of visual discrimination in much of the perceptual theory of the nineteenth century. More importantly, the ability to discern the illusion of motion

Fig 10 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Juggler (1859). Royal Photographic Society.

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was a major preoccupation of these investigations. One experimenter, Silvanus Thompson, lamented that: “There are frequent occasions of conflict between the receptive faculties of the senses and the reflective faculties of the intellect … of all the senses none is more frequently the seat of such deceptive judgments than that of sight” (Thompson 1880: 289). As his prime example, he noted that under certain circumstances “the retina ceases to perceive as a motion a steady succession of images that pass over a particular region for a sufficient time to induce fatigue.” A principle failure of the perceptual faculty was, then, an inability to discern motion by virtue of the fact that motion itself is made up of a “succession of images.” That is, Thompson’s account is implicitly invested in the notion that movement is comprised of a series of divisible, successive moments of immobility; time must be divisible if a “moment” of stasis can exist within a motion. This conception is deeply rooted in a classical philosophical debate on the nature of time and space, for it resurrects, in the guise of physiological experimentation, Zeno’s flying arrow paradox, which Aristotle’s Physics dedicated itself to resolving. He paraphrased his predecessor’s claim: “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless” (Faris 1996). Time, according to Zeno, is parceled out into discrete “nows,” a reality made visible only in the form of an object in flight. It is striking, and not happenstance, then, that the very account of time underlying industrial development—of its divisibility and exchangeability—is one whose expression

resuscitates an ancient representation. The “now” of the juggler’s trick not only harbors a sophisticated account of photographic temporality, but cultivates in its perceptual pedagogy an ideological time, the time of the modern worker and viewer.

Prepared for Any ContingencyThe didactic respectability of the precocious viewers in The Young Naturalist and The Fly Catcher has its wrong-side-of-the-tracks counterpart in another of Rejlander’s photographs from the same period. Two Urchins Playing a Game (Figure 11; c.1860) takes the visual skills cultivated by the juggler and his implied viewer into the streets, where a young boy glances skyward, preparing to

Fig 11 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Two Urchins Playing a Game (c.1860). George Eastman House.

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catch a falling object that is momentarily above the frame of the picture. It would be difficult, upon seeing this photograph, not to be struck by the extraordinary affinities it shares with the much later image made by Henri Cartier-Bresson of a boy similarly awaiting the return of his object into the field of the photograph. Valencia (1933) seems almost to be a direct reenactment of Rejlander’s photo, yet it is precisely the notion of staging a photographic homage that points to the crucial distinction between the two. One could hardly find a better embodiment than Valencia of Cartier-Bresson’s mantra, which crystallized in the title of his 1952 manifesto The Decisive Moment. For him, this decisive moment was one characterized by “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organization of forms which gave that event its proper expression” (Cartier-Bresson 1952). Although Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets reveal the numerous, discarded images adjacent to his decisive moment, he nevertheless maintained the primacy of the photograph of singular expressive quality. This celebration of the serendipitous accident, the fetishization of the singularity and ephemerality of a photographic moment, was antithetical to the notion of staging; any suggestion that Cartier-Bresson planned his image in relationship to Rejlander’s would seem an utter blasphemy. This pseudomorphism crucially delineates what was historically distinctive about the artificiality of nineteenth-century photographic instantaneity, for the decisive moment of the latter century was both a technical and, more crucially, a conceptual impossibility in the former.

Decisiveness aside, the moment itself was a consuming concern in the 1850s and 1860s, for the increasingly industrialized existence in Western Europe produced a reconceptualization of time that was amenable to the demands of capitalist production. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch and others have pointed out, the rationalization of time was a phenomenon that permitted a seeming continuum to be measured out into units (Schivelbusch 1986). Karl Marx registered this emerging possibility when he argued that the calculation of commodity value derived from measuring the abstraction of labor in terms of time. The homogeneity of temporal experience that was the precondition of its currency emerged alongside the development of the modern discipline of statistics, a field which dedicated itself to rationalizing all the seemingly stochastic features of life, of assimilating those events which, in their solitude, seemed incomprehensible, to stable and predictable patterns. “The allure of aggregate figures for many social thinkers,” it has been persuasively argued, “lay precisely in their insensitivity to political and economic crises” (Gigerenzer 1989: 38). With the industrialist comforted by the so-called law of large numbers, in which infinite repetition of events would always secure overall stable values despite the caprice of individual contingency, statistics were a vital participant in the debate about the humanity of industrialization. Indeed, it was quite literally the accidents involving machines that might befall workers that were an impetus for the collection of industrial data and its analysis, both for those who sought to measure and maximize efficiency and for the social reformers who questioned the brutality of the system

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(Mohun 2005). The mangled limbs of the worker and the consequent irregularities in production they caused came to stand for broader conceptual inefficiencies and, indeed, revolutionary interruptions, which were the adversaries of this program of numerical mastery. Chance and contingency were redolent with political connotations, for they represented the contested space of modern rationalization: even the most extreme anomalies of experience, the last redoubts of the inassimilable and unpredictable, were rapidly becoming accommodated to and defused by the relentless panopticism of statistical analysis.

The “moment” of Rejlander and Robinson might be called indecisive, since, for those appropriately discriminating viewers, it never made a bona fide claim to even constituting a moment. The coded but legible artifice of the photograph of the juggler virtuosically tossing his objects in the air obliterates the singularity of the moment, for the balls would be in the same position in the next moment, the next hour, the next day, suspended like Coupeau above the roofs of Paris while life goes on below. What seems a moment of utter exemplarity—the apex of the ball’s parabola, the girl recoiling from the wolf, the boy about to capture the fly—is revealed to be just the opposite. It is a moment of calculated, precise regularity masquerading as one of unstable contingency, one that seems to respond to Roland Barthes’s apprehensive evaluation of news photographs that “fix the most rare moment of a pattern of movement, its extreme peak—the balletic leap of a footballer, the soaring high-jump of an athlete, or the levitation of objects in a house haunted by poltergeists,” all “contrived with great technical skill” (Barthes 1999:

33). The possibility of genuine singularity is foreclosed in these earlier photographs, a disposition strikingly in accord with the homogeneity and interchangeability of industrial time, that clock to which photography itself was increasingly set. These images reveal to the viewers initiated into their patterns of deception an account of the photographic moment which shows the contingent instant to be a victim of the rationalized experience of time mandated by the needs of capital. The fantasies of the statistician and those of the industrialist overlapped in the nineteenth century, the integration of the unusual or recalcitrant into a stable regularity their shared aspiration. One historian has described the conjunction:

Statistical writers persuaded their contemporaries that systems consisting of numerous autonomous individuals can be studied at a higher level than that of the diverse atomic constituents. They taught them that such systems could be presumed to generate large-scale order and regularity which would be virtually unaffected by the caprice that seemed to prevail in the actions of individuals. (Porter 1986: 5)

The single moment, the autonomous individual, the solitary photograph: casualties all of the regularity that drove industrial modernity.

Mary Ann Doane has recently proposed that the

rationalization of time characterizing industrialization and the expansion of capitalism was accompanied by a structuring of contingency and temporality through emerging technologies of

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representation—a structuring that attempted to ensure their residence outside structure, to make tolerable an incessant rationalization … contingency, however, emerges as a form of resistance to rationalization which is saturated with ambivalence. (Doane 2002: 11)

We might well wonder to what extent this account is descriptive of the representations under consideration here, for these photographs seem suffused with the kind of ambivalent relationship to contingency and to time posited as central to the development of modernity. Both Rejlander’s and Robinson’s photographs comprise, in their artificial embodiment of an instantaneous moment, a more ambivalent response than the resistant space carved out a century later by Cartier-Bresson.

In a medium which, early in its history, was burdened with the notion that its images might be produced spontaneously by the objects they depicted, this apparent lack of agency suggested that, as James Lastra has written, “The camera made it possible, perhaps for the first time in history, to make a legible or meaningful representational image entirely by accident” Lastra 1997: 271). Such accidents were the impossibility of Robinson’s and Rejlander’s photographs, their coded evidence of intervention dispelling the element of chance. And if their apparent instantaneity might be confused with neutrality—the presumption that in “capturing things as they actually looked at a particular moment in time … there was little room … for intervention by the photographer”—the properly alert viewer would see otherwise (Prodger 2003: 43). That their pictures would select precisely

this feature of photographic fraudulence—its inability to capture the moment of accident or contingency—as the mode of their appeal to their discerning viewers suggests that those viewers’ sensibilities were already calibrated by a rationalized sense of what the moment constituted. Yet, they nevertheless appeared to demand a capacity antithetical to that regularity: an ability to discern that would mark off the contemplation of their photographs as an experience entirely dependent upon the vagaries of subjectivity, a differentiation of viewing which capitalized on rationalized modes of looking, but in doing so comprised a space of provisional autonomy.

This apparent exteriority to the structures of industrial life is not, however, equivalent to freedom from them, but rather the reorganization of the visual habituations of that experience to the putatively distinct realm of commerce. Perhaps the crucial dimension of temporal perception associated with the rise of wage employment is a heightened sense of the demarcation between time “on” and “off ” the clock. The laborer’s own time, with its newly commodified ethos, was, in the case of viewing photographs like the ones we have examined, spent in a milieu which seemed to offer a respite from the inculcation of time’s homogenized value—the conceptual basis for industrial capitalism—even as it reiterated that characterization in its denial of the exemplary moment. The repertoire of visual discrimination upon which Rejlander and Robinson relied for their commercial success served in the vital role of what Doane has described as a mode of representation that resides outside of the space of rationalization which renders it a tolerable regime under

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which to live, but which is nevertheless permeated by its prerogatives. This insidious extension of the manufactory’s tentacles was perspicuously expressed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their analysis of the “culture industry.” Their characterization could easily serve as a description of the phenomena embodied in these photographs:

By occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day … his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1988 [1944]: 131)

I take the figure of “afterimages” here to be more than a haphazardly chosen turn of phrase, for it is not simply the case that these modes of amusement “bear the impress” of work but, further, that they furnish a space in which the discernment of the difference between work and play can be made only with recourse to the very visual brand of judgment licensed by industrial toil.

The cultivation of visual discernment among an emerging viewership in the 1850s could be a remarkably lucrative space of leisure, but only by appealing to modes of looking that had become inescapably infused by the sensibilities and demands of work. Rejlander and Robinson could thus position their works to appeal to two seemingly antithetical constituencies, for they embraced the kind of intervention and authorial presence which seemed to an older generation of gentlemen amateurs inimical to the prerogatives of mass production,

but also tailored the revelation of that intervention to a visual sensibility which presupposed the primacy of that very mode of production. Of course, any such program of self-revealing photographic deception can exist only within a visual universe accustomed to a deep ambivalence about photographic transparency, a skepticism that is the concomitant of the visual demands of industrial capitalism: of a realm of commercial leisure recalibrated to erect the illusion of a space beyond the grip of the factory and its time-thrift. One was never entirely “off the clock” if one could see.

By the late 1800s, the improved shackling of the human being to the regularities of that clock came with the wide dissemination of wristwatches, a device that tethered the worker to the synchronized realm of labor which he sought, in vain, to abandon. The inculcation of the temporality of work achieved by this appendage ramified the logic of time’s divisibility, and, as Jean Baudrillard has written, “By treating time as a substance that can be cut up, it turns it into an object of consumption.” For Baudrillard, this severable time is intimately linked with the denial of singularity that consumption requires, for “the truly unique object—absolute, entirely without antecedent, incapable of being integrated into any sort of set—is unthinkable … without the series there would be no possibility of playing the game” (Baudrillard 1995). The inconceivable unique object is not an immutable feature of civilization, but rather a historically specific product of the refinement of capitalist production and consumption, a denial of the singularity of time spent in either of those pursuits. That industrial time is infused with the logic of the series seems to reiterate at

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a conceptual level that which we observed in the debunking of “decisive” moments in the photographs of Rejlander and Robinson. The singularity of experience denied to the worker by industrial temporality fuels a desire which, in the perverse vicious circle of consumer capitalism, can only be fulfilled by a futile chase for the possession of that unique object which his own labor has helped to make extinct. The series of divisible units of time through which labor could be calculated infiltrated the disposition of leisure time, tethering it to an account of consumption which might reiterate the ethos of work even in the space of the laborer’s most intimate fantasies of possession, or, rather, of self-possession.

We cannot overestimate the deep concern among reformers in industrial cities that the streets were, in the words of E. P. Thompson, packed with “idle ragged children; who are not only losing their Time, but learning habits of gaming” (Thompson 1967). The loss of Time was the unequaled transgression in this world of efficiencies and calculable regularities. Such sins could, however, be ameliorated, wrote one advocate:

There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them. (Thompson 1967: 84)

Agreeable and entertaining: an aspiration of capital aided by the spaces of ostensible leisure constituted by the visual apprehension

of photographic images. Rejlander’s Two Urchins Playing a Game might be an emblem of this system, for in the idle, useless gaming of the two children is encoded the practice of visual discrimination as a kind of productive leisure. The leisure of lost time is not the worthy practice of the juggler and the refinement of his mathematical mind, nor that of the budding geologist. This gaming, fully outside the sanctioned off-time space of visual discernment, is what the photograph itself seeks to supplant. It is a misuse of that vital capacity, the embodiment of individual caprice, the unassimilated profligacy of time and of vision.

This era’s greatest logician and statistician John Venn described the desires that gave rise to this denigrated ludic mode. “Some persons,” Venn wrote,

find life too monotonous for their taste, or rather the region of what can be predicted with certainty is too large and predominant in their estimation … they may invent games or other pursuits, the individual contingencies of which are entirely removed from all possible human prevision, and then make heavy money consequences depend upon these contingencies. (Venn 2002 [1866]: 28)

But Venn cautions his reader that the pursuit of this course is “for the most part of a risky and enticing kind, to say nothing of its ignoble and often dishonest character.” The creation of such games as those practiced by the two urchins—tomorrow’s workers—was not only an unproductive brand of leisure, but one which sought to transgress the regularity of industrial experience. Games of chance were permissible only as long as the outcome was never in question, the very

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promise of the Urchins photograph. The viewer of the photograph, in his discernment of the artificiality of the instant it constructs, of the impossibility of an exemplary moment existing in industrial modernity or registering before the camera, is himself the antidote to the kind of unproductive visual discrimination practiced by the boy, his eye fixed on a nonexistent airborne object. Discerning photographic artifice was the visual autonomy granted to the worker in exchange for his discernment of the cost of that freedom: of the very artifice that was his temporary liberty.

AcknowledgementThe author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Anne Higonnet, Jonathan Crary, John Tagg, Alison Nordstrom and the members of the “Educated Eye” conference at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where the study was first presented.

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Look Again: The Multiples of Photographic Discernment and Production

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Transcript of Look Again: The Multiples of Photographic Discernment and Production